What If It’s Going to Take a Lot of Love?

Talking about a lot of love… That’s my gorgeous, positively hilarious sister who forever has broken into the song, “It’s gonna take a lotta love,” when things were getting choppy in her life.

Today I find myself singing hers (and Neil Young’s) song. Life for my big sis and our nation and world has hardly been a straight shot to the moon. You don’t have to be traversing the friendly skies to feel the turbulence out there.

Since the start of this year, if not asking “what the f__?” I’ve asked “what if?” It’s been the far more empowering question for me and I’ve gotten a few insights. But today I realize if I could wrap all those insights up into one blanket, the answer that would come back to me is one word – Love. Followed by these lyrics:

It’s gonna take a lotta love

To change the way things are.

It’s gonna take a lot of love

Or we won’t get too far.

And I’m wondering: what if Neil got it right and the Merriam Webster dictionary needs a recall on this one. They’ve declared love is a noun. I think love is a verb. I really do. It’s actionable in every way. It has to be! “Or we won’t get too far.” We never have gotten far without love.

Maybe it’s because we limit our most desired love to only romantic, that we don’t see the action of love can come into our lives in every conceivable way. It’s a practice, if we choose it, with every action we take and living creature we encounter from ourselves to a plant to a pet to a person. It can bring new meaning to our seemingly ordinary moments along with strength, creativity, and joy. The universe has this practice down pat and can’t stop doing it. It knows no other way to express itself but as love.

Meanwhile, we too can’t help but express the consciousness we come from. Will we remember?

Love is the answer. That’s the real news though we won’t see it in any headlines. It can’t fill a 24- hour news cycle. Maybe it sounds too dangerous and simple to sing:

So if you look in my direction

and we don’t see eye to eye.

My heart needs protection

And so do I.

Probably it sounds like we already know this. Old news.

But what if there’s no news older than what we’re terrified is coming next?

Same war – different day.

Maybe nothing is more threatening to us than the simple.

Love, by my definition means it all matters. Even what we think are our simplest of thoughts. I try, though not always successfully, to keep my less loving ones about others in check because on some level I believe that an unloving thought goes out into this world to stir up action like a “free radical.” It scorches what it touches then keeps spreading. Talk about your “mother of all bombs!”

Love heals and right now everything and everyone is in serious need of it.

What if, as Shakespeare wrote we “love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

How bad could that be?

What if love means breaking our treatises with mediocrity?

That the game as we’ve played it is just over. We’ve just run out of those rounds. What new game and rules will we choose to live by now?

“So if you are out there waiting

I hope you show up soon.

My heart needs relating

Not solitude.”

What if it really and truly isgoing to take a lot of love – first, foremost and no kidding?